


The God of Porous Borders

by Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas)



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, M/M, Pre-Slash, Prey (Endeavour), The Dead of Winter, The point of vanishing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 11:05:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6236200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackie_Thomas/pseuds/Jackie%20Thomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was once, he claimed, a tiger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The God of Porous Borders

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a missing scene from the Point of Vanishing but also refers to things learnt about James’ early life in the Dead of Winter and Series 9. Dead of Winter hasn’t happened yet. It also references the Endeavour S3 episode, Prey. The story contains spoilers for all these wonderful episodes.

From the palace steps James can see the floodlights SOCO have set up inside the maze to illuminate the crime scene. The light bleeds into surrounding parkland and something long-limbed and powerful, flame orange and streaked black, emerges from the darkness, pauses, sniffs the air and moves swiftly on.

James finishes his last cigarette and goes in search of Lewis. He finds him having a prickly conversation with Innocent as she readies herself to leave. Lewis is philosophical when a case spirals like this; a wrongly identified corpse, a second murder, a missing suspect. The Chief Superintendent is less so.

They have dismissed most of the officers who have been here overnight, leaving a few standing watch until the morning shift arrives to relieve them. The family were taken home hours ago and all the party guests have now been interviewed and released. The staff too have been statemented and sent home and the lights of the great house start to go out. It is 4.30am and they are waiting now for SOCO to finish searching Blenheim maze with fine-tooth comb and tweezer.

“Seems like no one saw anything,” James tells Lewis once their CS has gone. “Everyone having too much fun to notice a knife-wielding maniac. Us included, apparently. There were a few people taking pictures though; we might get something from those.”

“See if CCTV picked up anyone leaving the park around the time of the murder,” Lewis says. “And there were a couple of secret service agents covering the grounds, let’s get permission to speak to them.” 

He yawns and blinks himself awake.

“I can finish here, sir,” James says. “If you want to get away.”

Now things are winding down, a hopeful vision of breakfast starts to present itself.

Lewis has other ideas. 

“No thanks, James. Once SOCO are done I want to take another look at the scene.”

They had gone into the maze earlier, before Steven Mullen’s body was moved but they ought to have a second look in daylight. They get the all clear not long after the flesh-pink sunrise is complete.

Someone, attempting to rid the case of its comic potential, has sketched a route to the place where the body was found and, with the maze now empty, they follow the pencil-drawn map.

They find tracks left in damp earth by Jessica’s wheelchair, ending at a spot where handfuls of hedge have been pulled away.

“Jess must have done that, trying to stand,” James says. “Why? Why not just turn around and go for help?”

“What was she doing in here, anyway?” Lewis asks. “I know she wasn’t really up for her birthday party but it seems odd to come in on her own in the dark.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t get anything out of her. She was terrified though.”

“And how did Mullen know where to find her? Assuming he came to Blenheim to harm her, that is.”

“Ah, I just don’t see it.”

“I know you don’t, but he was in a pretty desperate mood. He was waiting outside your house with a rock in his hand the other night.” 

James remains appalled by the possibilities of this, but it seems to have slipped Lewis’ mind.

“I know, I know, but we’re missing something.” He walks on. “I’m missing a lot lately, aren’t I? Hathaway?”

He is momentarily thrown, “Are we talking about Fiona?”

But Lewis is striding off, refusing to say more, leaving James to catch up. 

They take two more turnings in silence and then they are at the site of the murder. They find a mass of blood-soaked earth staked out with police tape at the spot where Mullen fell. More tape and darkened ground chart his staggered last steps. 

Sometimes James’ nightmares look like this. A befouled path deep inside a maze, the leavings of an attack, the victim hauled off in lethal jaws.

Lewis examines the stains on the ground and splatter on the hedge and fence. He never could solve a murder from behind a desk, he needs a physical sense of it; he needs to absorb it through the soles of his shoes, to breathe its blemished air. He comes to a standstill beside James, still immersed, fitting this new chapter into the story he is telling in his mind.

“Could Tom Rattenbury really have done this?” 

Cecile, Tom and Daniel Rattenbury all have the same motive for murdering both Steven Mullen and, mistakenly, Alex Hadley. Cecile has the stone heart to carry it off but the men are more likely to possess the physical strength. The son has a potentially violent temper but both murders show signs of premeditation and it is the father who has now disappeared, along with the murder weapon. It seems clear, but Lewis is not satisfied.

“If he didn’t do it, where is he?”

Lewis considers then parks this question with all the others.

“I think we can head off now,” he says brushing dust from his hands. 

James glances at his watch, “Fred’s is just opening for breakfast.”

Lewis smiles, “I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”

They follow the map but somehow go wrong and the turning that ought to get them to the exit just seems to draw them in deeper. 

“No, hang on,” James says and leads them one way.

“I think left,” Lewis says and leads them another.

Something keeps pace with them.

It pads silently along parallel paths, moving fluidly as through water, in and out of time, there and not there, the shadow-hunter.

Five minutes later they find themselves at the centre of the maze. Lewis swipes the map from James’ hand, “Is this upside down?”

“No. Oh.” 

It is dizzying to be suddenly in the open, under a rapidly unfolding sky at the point where all the puzzle thoroughfares meet. The sun on its morning progression has stopped to mock and dazzle them and a Greek god on a plinth, naked and weather-worn, reaches up, preparing to soar into it. James blinks to dismiss the dark orange flash rearing up at the edge of his vision. He is sure this would be a lot easier if either of them had slept in twenty-four hours or eaten in twelve.

“If we ever catch this murderer,” Lewis says. “I’m charging him with wasting police time.”

“We should have had a ball of string,” James tells him, through a yawn. “Like Ariadne gave Theseus to help him find his way out of the Labyrinth.”

Lewis gives him the poisonous look reserved for perpetrators of classical mythology. 

“Go on then, that was the one with the Minotaur?”

“Exactly sir, half man, half bull with a taste for human flesh. The Labyrinth was designed so those sacrificed to the Minotaur could never escape.”

“Not particularly reassuring, sergeant.”

“I know, but Theseus did defeat him and find his way out. Though he had string and we don’t.”

“And no Ariadne either.” Lewis says. “Last I heard, she took a transfer to the Met.”

Again?

“You think I should have told you about Fiona,” he says letting his impatience show. “In future, I’ll endeavour to keep you fully informed of my relationships, or lack thereof. I’m intending to try my luck with Battleship Potempka, I’ll report back.” 

Lewis looks at him and there is something in his eyes James cannot define which knocks the smartarse out of him.

“We didn’t break up because of Fiona’s career,” James admits. “We broke up because the whole thing was a disaster from the start.”

He does not intend to rehash the drunken falling together, the awkward date, the disastrous night, the relief he felt when it all came to nothing. The uncomfortable sense the whole misadventure was somehow a betrayal. Though he cannot say of who or what. 

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Lewis says. “You deserve some happiness.”

He shrugs, he is not sure what he deserves. 

“So is that Theseus?” Lewis nods up at the statue, allowing the change of the subject.

“No its Hermes. Or Mercury if you’re Roman. The winged messenger of the gods.”

Lewis regards the statue with a policeman’s sceptical eye. No message is forthcoming. Just another witness failing to come up with the goods. 

“Come on, James, let’s go.”

James glances back before he follows, trying to mentally retrace his steps, find what he glimpsed and then lost sight of. But he sees only Hermes, the presiding spirit of this liminal space. The god of boundaries and transitions, the trickster, the conductor of dreams and escort of the newly dead to the underworld. He must have taken Steven Mullen by the hand tonight.

When James was a child at Crevecoeur, it was no god but his father who had charge of the clipped corridors of the family maze; his Lordship’s labyrinth. He attempted to keep the estate children out of it by telling them it was liable to infestation by big cats maddened by the taste of human meat. An extraordinary and random lie told with such conviction the children, when they were small at least, never dared to fully disbelieve him. 

There was once, he claimed, a tiger.

It is a story so firmly implanted in James’ consciousness that the myth of the Minotaur still holds a particular, personal kind of terror. Even getting lost with Lewis like this is starting to send adrenaline corkscrewing through his system. His fingers itch for the cigarette he does not have and Lewis is casting him sidelong glances.

“All right?” Lewis asks.

“Fine.” 

When their father wasn’t around, their mother would whisper to them, ‘Keep moving, keep going, no looking back, never come back.’ 

She kept whispering until she succeeded in sending them both away; one here, one there. He has lost the substance of her warnings, forgotten, if he ever knew, why she was so sure they should go, but still he hears her.

‘Keep moving, keep going, no looking back, never come back.’ 

“I’m not sure about this,” Lewis says, coming to a junction.

James stops too; he recognises it. For all his mother’s urging, they have been this way before. Children run in and out of this maze without difficulty but they are lost. Again. Get a grip, Hathaway.

“Sorry, I can’t - is it this way?”

“What’s the matter, man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” 

“No, I’m all right. Not keen on mazes, that’s all.”

The pathways are wider and more circuitous than he remembers, the hedges neatly trimmed and fenced in. But this is Blenheim not Crevecoeur. Crevecoeur with its catching thorns and shadowy nooks. 

“Morse was the same,” Lewis says unexpectedly. “Except he was terrified of them, you couldn’t get him in one at all.”

“I didn’t realise it was a thing.”

“I don’t know that it is. Morse had a run-in with a tiger in a maze and didn’t ever get over it.”

James stops, forcing Lewis to do the same, “When was this?”

“Back in the sixties when he was still a DC. Why?”

“My father said – my father had a story about an escaped tiger getting into the maze at the place he used to work. It isn’t – I mean, I assumed he’d invented it.”

“A bit of a coincidence if he did. I can’t remember the name of the house off hand. Where did your dad work?”

Lewis lets James’ silence pass with a questioning look and carries on with Morse’s version of his father’s fabulous tale.

“Some genius was keeping a tiger in Wytham Wood. It found its way to the grounds of a big old house with a maze and cornered him and a girl with a baby just before it got shot.”

James is aware of the astonished expression he must be wearing. He doubts, on principle, anything his father tells him, but this is Lewis. He might as well be telling him Morse caught the Mortmaignes changing princes into frogs and straw into gold. Had Red Riding Hood’s wolf once been a tiger? Had Saint George’s dragon? Monsters, princesses; he had long decided his father was simply rummaging in Jung’s collective unconscious to terrify, because this surely didn’t happen. 

“Morse said the police shot it. His Chief Superintendent, in fact.”

“My father said he did. To save one of the daughters of the house.”

“Well, that might have been trying to impress you.”

“I doubt that was the reason.”

It was one of the stories he produced when he wanted to belittle James. After a less than dignified encounter with a spider, or if he cried when they found a rabbit caught in a trap, when he wouldn’t go fishing, or went and sulked. ‘I faced down a tiger. How can you be my son?’ 

“Morse definitely said it was his CS. Not that I’m in favour of arming Chief Superintendents per se. Not after this case anyway.” 

Lewis’ voice has temporarily lost its power to soothe and James gets a sharp, assessing look when he cannot find an answer for him. 

“What else did he say?” James asks.

“He said it was one of the girls, one of the daughters, who deliberately lured the creature to the house with tigress musk. Tigress musk. That was the sixties for you. You could probably get it at the Co-op. Does that ring a bell?”

“Yes, it does. At the time it would have been Lady Julia or Lady Georgina.”

Scarlett’s vanished aunts. He had almost believed they were inventions too; so little sign of them remained. The girls who had looked directly into Crevecoeur’s fractured heart and not survived.

Three more turnings and they find themselves gazing again at the statue of Hermes.

“Buggering hell,” James says, spinning round because there it is again. Something concealed, almost beyond sight.

“Well said, sergeant,” Lewis says with studied cheeriness. “What do you think, maybe we’ll just stay? Fashion a shelter from twigs.”

The breath leaves his body at the thought.

To the children, Crevecoeur maze was alive with secret tigers. A tail, a giant paw, a yawning set of needle sharp teeth. Here was one on its haunches getting ready to bound over that hedge, there was another waiting for you, slavering, around the next corner. It lived in the summer house but hunted prey in the maze. Can you hear it coming for you? Can you smell its sour breath? 

James’ friend Paul made a surprisingly effective tiger. He was a small, stammering boy as slight and precise as James was lanky and clumsy. In their games he would prowl the gloomy walkways of the maze before leaping out at whoever happened to be quarry with an unexpectedly fearsome roar.

Perhaps James is waiting for him now, waiting for that pounce, for that child, bearing his burden of secrets.

He is startled by Lewis appearing at his side.

“Sorry, sir,” he says, sifting through his memory for the last thing the man said to him. “Did you want me to build a fire? Gather nuts and berries for breakfast?”

Lewis presses his hand to James’ back to guide him on.

“Let’s give freedom another go, shall we?” 

He nods, grateful for the contact as he tries to escape his mind. For all its cleverness, he hates it sometimes; a labyrinth of dark corners and blind alleys he dare not venture into, littered as it is with bodies of the fallen and inhabited by something monstrous. 

But he saw something.

“Hold on a second, sorry.”

He turns back into the centre of the maze. Because before the panic seized him, he saw something. He casts about for it now and finds it again. It is a leaf bearing a single drop of blood and beyond it a point of light in the leafy dark. He crouches to push back a section of hedge. Lewis sees it too and joins him to part branches of compactly grown yew. They find a kitchen knife, still wet with blood.

“You must have eyes like a hawk,” Lewis says admiringly. “Our man panicked, ran off, got himself lost and ditched the knife here. We’ll keep someone on the lookout in case he comes back for it.”

James bags the knife and, as he looks, Steven Mullen’s blood imprints itself on the clear plastic and he has the sensation of tumbling, of falling into a past where the hedges tower because he is so small. He hears the low growl of an animal preparing to attack.

There is no chase, nowhere to run, no vanishing point, no Chief Superintendent with a rifle. There is predator and there is prey. His mother’s voice is incomprehensible and his father’s is a lie. But Lewis is here and that, as he is slowly discovering, is enough.

When his beating, pulsing shadow-heart stops, when he freezes in terror, Lewis who sees everything, does something so extraordinary James will afterwards doubt his memory of it. He cups James’ head with his hand and brings it down to kiss him twice; once on his forehead and once, a moment later, on his cheek.

“We’re fine,” he tells him. “There’s nothing to worry about. We’re going to get out of here. Understand? And before you know it, we’ll be sitting down to a fry-up at Fred’s. Which I will buy since you found the murder weapon.”

Somehow Lewis gets him standing, and with a hand resting gently on his shoulder, walking. The god of porous borders at last permits their release and the enchantment binding them to the maze is broken.

They will keep working. They will review dozens of witness statements, hundreds of photographs and miles of CCTV footage. They will find Tom Rattenbury, have another go at getting straight answers out of the family, speak to Laura, to SOCO and, who knows, get a decent thumb print off the knife. 

They will solve these crimes or they won’t but first James will sit down to breakfast with Inspector Lewis and the monsters of his imagination will, for a time, take their rest.

 

End

March 2016


End file.
